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Want to Awesomize Your Attendee Experience? Use A Mobile Event App.

As a CMO, events, conferences, and tradeshows have always been an essential part of my marketing mix. They’re the perfect venue to deliver content to a captive audience, an opportunity to meet face-to-face with potential buyers, and create a branded experience like no other marketing channel. However, historically, impact from events has been hard measure when compared to other marketing channels.

I know that I can go to my paid team and ask about the latest performance metrics and get a detailed analysis from conversion rates to A/B testing and everything in-between. I can go to my SEO team and know exactly where I rank across various search terms, or whether or not we need to make changes to our strategy. My email marketing team can tell me which subject lines and calls-to-action perform best across the various stages of our lead funnel. Yet, for the longest time my events team has had a near-impossible time explaining the value of “the experience” in the same way.

Thankfully, mobile events apps are finally changing the game, allowing conference organizers to communicate with attendees digitally, learn from attendee behavior trends, and collect valuable data to demonstrate event success. For the first time in history, my events team can come back to me with solid insights to event performance — and the data doesn’t lie.

The first time I used a mobile event app was as the CMO at Saba Software. At the Saba @Work User Conference in 2013, we decided to use DoubleDutch as an mobile event app to deliver an digita guide and a more engaging attendee experience.

I was blown away by how the mobile app transformed the experience and energy of our entire conference. Our attendees were ecstatic about connecting with many people at once, having more visibility to the sessions, and sharing real-time feedback to everything that was happening at the event. For the marketing team, the app gave us unprecedented data, perspectives, and insight that we could use to measure and finetune our content and programs for future events.

Of all the marketing programs today, events represent the biggest spend and most significant opportunity for transformation – from largely physical to digital, social and mobile; from flying blind to making data-based decisions; and from activity-intense to performance-driven. It’s time for CMOs and marketing organizations around the globe to adopt mobile event apps and leverage them to: